Posts Tagged ‘rare’

I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

(Telegram from Marilyn Monroe declining a party invitation from Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. June 13, 1962.)

You got to fight for your right to twinkle. It is difficult and discouraging and at times seems insurmountable, but in the end, you are raised up to the sky to shine forever. Please try to help each other out and let’s none of us lose heart.

Not only did this Movie Millisecond inspire me to create a Gregory Peck category (can’t believe I didn’t have one yet), but I get to trot out the unintentionally seldom-used Hitchcock category, too. It’s a razzle-dazzle day!

As an Army “brat” (her father is Maj. Paul James Tate), she spent a great deal of her childhood packing and moving from one military base to another.

Before Sharon was 15, she had lived in Tacoma, Houston, El Paso and San Francisco — just to name a few cities. When Maj. Tate was shipped overseas in 1959, he took his wife and Sharon with him. As a result, Sharon boasts a fluency in Italian and a diploma from a Vicenza, Italy, high school.

(“Sharon Tate is on a crash program to get to the top.” New York Daily News, December 18, 1966.)

I believe that childhood upheaval, while it does give you an interesting background, is part of why she reports having been so painfully shy. I moved around a lot as a kid and felt the same. In interviews, though, she cites her background as having made her a “people watcher,” and a person who is open to new experiences and travel. I appreciate that, true to form, she gleaned the positive from what could have been a negative experience, and I think the above picture beautifully exemplifies that attitude of attenuation to detail and desire to marvel at the world around you.

I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

(Telegram from Marilyn Monroe declining a party invitation from Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. June 13, 1962.)

You got to fight for your right to twinkle. It is difficult and discouraging and at times seems insurmountable, but in the end, you are raised up to the sky to shine forever. Please try to help each other out and let’s none of us lose heart.

I have this very hackneyed and cliched theory that women are like cats and men are like dogs. It’s overarching and misogynistic and probably a bunch of hooey, because I can’t even apply it to my own good girl friends, but the thing is sometimes it feels like it is just exactly the truth. In talking to my daughter’s father this weekend, I found out that his wife, from whom he is very recently separated, apparently doesn’t like me. By which I mean, hella does not like me. Historically, even. This is pretty distressing to me because, like an idiot, I thought we were cool.

Not only had I been really excited about meeting her, about which I clearly remember writing in several entries, but in the actual event of it I’d made a point of being polite, respectful, friendly, and talkative with her on the occasions we met. We talked at various times both in person and in letters about my move down here, about cooking, about our families — I really thought we’d hit it off. I gave her a card for Valentine’s day and tried consistently to be as friendly and upbeat as possible when she wrote me about her troubles with my daughter’s father, encouraging her and saying I was praying for the best possible outcome.

Photgraphed by Andre de Dienes.

To find out that she not only never liked me before but I am thinking pretty much actively hates me now was upsetting, but it was not the hardest blow. That was still to come. I don’t understand it, and I’ve known for a long time that his sister didn’t like me, never really understood why she had a bad impression of me but eventually gave up hoping she would change her mind and have just continued in as friendly a way as possible, but things are really compounded now. The toughest thing for me to grapple with is that Grandma P, who I’d always counted as a friend and counted on for sitting for my daughter and as a sounding board now and again in my own life, actually thought that my daughter’s father left his wife for me. That she would even consider drawing a conclusion like that, after knowing me all this time and knowing the separation and pain that I myself have been going through this year, is shocking and devastating to me.

The thing with his wife was bad enough, but the thing with his mom is stunning to me, and, as the time has gone by since he and I talked this weekend and I’ve had a chance to work through the jumble of feelings I have about all this, it turns out that’s one of the things that I’m having the toughest time with. I guess I was a fool? to imagine I had a connection with Grandma P, a) because I know better about myself and how some people just don’t like me, and b) I know that connections with many people are illusory and couched in ulterior motives. But I really did think that we were friends. I’ve welcomed her in to every home in which I’ve lived, always looked forward to her visits, encouraged her to call frequently and to have a relationship with my daughter even when her father and I were not in touch. So this has been a big surprise.

I don’t know why they dislike me so. If it’s because he and I hurt each other five years ago, then, isn’t that between us? I understand. When people hurt my friends and the ones I love, I want to tear them apart — but I also trust my friends’ and loved ones’ judgment. And if they tell me that it’s okay, then I have to know that that’s the end of my anger, and they know the way of it better than me. So if we can forgive one another and rebuild a friendship for not only our daughter’s sake but for the redemption of our own selves, then why in the name of heaven is that a bad or threatening thing?

This is what I mean about cats and women. They are full of secrets and you can never know what they are thinking. When dogs don’t like you, they make no trouble to disguise it: they bark and growl at you and try to bite. Cats are so much sneakier, you think they are fun to play with and you can trust them, and all the while they are stalking around and then coming out of nowhere with their claws … These women that I thought I could tentatively call friends made me think I was doing an okay job of becoming something like close and bonded with them, convinced me to offer up parts of myself and my personal backstories which I have a terrible time doing exactly because of situations like this, and it turns out that I guess I was wrong. I failed to meet the mark in some way, or could never have done so for some reason that is totally shrouded in mystery to me, like when they were handing out the woman-cat brains I was at a Polish sausage stand and missed the memo. It’s a real bummer.

There is nothing I can do about it except keep upbeat, focus on the daisies and bluebirds, and keep offering the olive branch as I have tried again and again to do — and pray that it “takes” at some eventual time. Because we have all got to know each other basically until we die, and I don’t understand why that has to be unpleasant or filled with drama, when we can just as easily choose to find the good in the situation? Until then, until they come around, I guess, I have to concentrate, have to try and stop dwelling on it and stop feeling sorry for myself, accept what I cannot change, and go forward. It’s just harder to do than say.

In a cowboy hat on the set of Green Mansions, 1958. It was directed by her husband, Mel Ferrer. They divorced.

“Your heart just breaks, that’s all. But you can’t judge, or point fingers. You just have to be lucky enough to find someone who appreciates you.”

So the same week that the HRH is here, my daughter’s other father has burst back on to the scene, and who can blame him? She is wonderful and there is no right or wrong time to accept a father’s love. The only person who would be hurt in the situation is me, and that’s a selfish reason to hold her apart from him, his wife, and their son. So when they are ready, I imagine we’ll meet up. In fact, I’m actually eager to. That’s my daughter’s flesh and blood, and it’s been a long time since I tucked a fuzzy little baby head under my chin. I am far from made of stone.

I am sad to say I’ve lost the credit for this photo.

“People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.”

On top of that, my husband and I have been hashing over what went wrong in our marriage, with an eye mainly toward how to heal as friends and continue to do our best as my daughter’s parents, and, with cards all out on the table, we’ve drawn some not-so-upbeat conclusions. Knowing the whole truth about things I always half-suspected does not make those things hurt less; however, while it’s not the kind of thing you ever want to be right about, you know that it can’t get worse, and you’ve already survived it without even knowing, so why not keep moving forward? But despite it all, despite the icy gutpunches and sad truths being dealt and faced between us, for some reason I am finally in this really good place, feeling deeply and essentially all right about things — feeling far and away better than I was when I was anxious and wondering all the time what would happen next and putting off thinking about it all, with either of them.

Audrey, second from left, and her mother Ella,far right. During the occupation of Holland during World War II, in the midst of blackouts and starvation, Audrey, Ella, and a small group of others entertained the people of their town by putting on plays. This was taken in 1940, not too long after her Uncle Otto was executed for being part of the Underground.

“I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.”

Now it’s all here and by some strange miracle all that churning through my emotions has paid off and I feel this tremendous sense of peace and rightness: I know that whatever happens, will happen. I am not granted happiness or misery by any given situation, and faith and grace and love are a choice. It’s the sort of thing I have heard all my life and never understood how to make work, so selfishly, turned inward with my thoughts and fears, I assumed that those kinds of phrases and ideas were smarmy cliches, or somehow hollow, inapplicable to real life problems. But they aren’t. That’s a revolutionary idea for me. I mean, I strove, or thought I did, to keep upbeat, to respond to my friends and strangers with as much love as I thought I could muster, but I don’t think I was digging deeply enough.

Lotus eaters! Audrey and James Garner goofing around on the set of The Children’s Hour.

“When the chips are down, you are alone, and loneliness can be terrifying. Fortunately, I’ve always had a chum I could call. And I love to be alone. It doesn’t bother me one bit. I’m my own company.”

I’ve had to live it to understand it. I get it now. All I can do is accept what comes as gracefully as I can, show that I’m coming from a place of love, and hope for more happiness to follow. It’s really my choice. I have my friends, my family, and most of all myself. This place I’m in can be permanent, I just have to work at choosing grace.